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Solar C³ities is an international platform with the intention of providing an open-source virtual Hackspace for "Biogas Innoventors and Practitioners" and training for all those researching, developing and deploying sustainable solutions for flourishing societies.

Describe all we need to know about your project.

People used to think that biogas systems needed to be big, were difficult and needed experts to construct, needed to be outdoors, and needed a lot of animal manure to work.

None of this is true.

In our work in Solar C3ITIES (Connecting Community Catalysts Integrating Technologies for Industrial Ecology Solutions) we have demonstrated in dozens of countries from Botswana to Alaska, in both rural and urban homes, and at Mercy College New York and in other Universities and private homes (increasingly indoors, in families' basements!), that it is yawningly easy to take one of those ubiquitous used IBC shipping container tanks (1000 liter polypropylene International Bulk Containers) that are found in every country in the world and a couple of uniseals or bulkhead fittings and some plastic pipes and create in just a few hours a really effective, really low cost, easy to build biodigester.

These home scale biodigesters, using the principle of anaerobic fermentation, can turn almost all organic residues (food scraps and all kitchen wastes, including all the meat and grease and fat and bones and toilet wastes and animal droppings that cities won't let you compost, everything except for woody material like branches) safely and efficiently into useful, reliable cooking fuel (biogas) that can also be stored for use in emergency generators, gas lamps or refrigerators. Each IBC produces between an hour and two hours of cooking gas per day from a daily input of approximately one bucket of ground up food scraps.

The systems, using 24 hour anaerobic fermentation of these wastes, also produce a liquid compost -- an NPK rich compost tea, that can be directly used with hydroponics and vertical aeroponic gardens as the sole source of fertilizer, ensuring that nutritious food can be grown right in the city and other areas where there is no available land for agriculture.

The IBCs can be used in a modular fashion, used in series and parallel, increasing the amounts of waste consumed and gas and fertilizer produced. Our research, living with home biogas and biofertilizer produced this way for the past six years, has proven its effectiveness. We are closing the metabolic rift and we want to get the word out, make this simple solution open source and available and empower others to do this as quickly as possible.

Question:

What´s innovative? Why does the world need it? On what technology or method is it based?